Zero K

by Don DeLillo

  We waited.

  “What’s the result? The result is a new way for us to understand our place in the galaxy.”

  We waited some more.

  “Or what else?” she said. “Or a man with a gun walks out of a crowd toward the leader of a major nation and nothing is ever quite the same.”

  She looked into the table, thinking.

  “Your situation, those few of you on the verge of the journey toward rebirth. You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are.”

  She looked at them, one by one, my father and the other four.

  “You are about to become, each of you, a single life in touch only with yourself.”

  Did she make it sound forbidding?

  “Others, far greater in number, have come here in failing health in order to die and be prepared for the chamber. You are to be postmarked Zero K. You are the heralds, choosing to enter the portal prematurely. The portal. Not a grand entranceway or flimsy website but a complex of ideas and aspirations and hard-earned realities.”

  I needed a name for her. I hadn’t named anyone on this visit. A name would add dimension to the lithe body, suggest a place of origin, help me identify the circumstances that had brought her here.

  “It will not be total darkness and utter silence. You know this. You’ve been instructed. First you will undergo the biomedical redaction, only a few hours from now. The brain-edit. In time you will re-encounter yourself. Memory, identity, self, on another level. This is the main thrust of our nanotechnology. Are you legally dead, or illegally so, or neither of these? Do you care? You will have a phantom life within the braincase. Floating thought. A passive sort of mental grasp. Ping ping ping. Like a newborn machine.”

  She took a walk around the table, addressing us from the other end. Never mind giving her a name, I thought. That was last time. I wanted this visit to be over. The determined father in his uterine tube. The aging son in his routine pursuits. The return of Emma Breslow. The position of compliance and ethics officer. Check the wallet, check the keys. The walls, the floor, the furniture.

  “If our planet remains a self-sustaining environment, how nice for everyone and how bloody unlikely,” she said. “Either way, the subterrane is where the advanced model realizes itself. This is not submission to a set of difficult circumstances. This is simply where the human endeavor has found what it needs. We’re living and breathing in a future context, doing it here and now.”

  I looked across the table at Ross. He was elsewhere, not dreamily adrift but thinking hard, thinking back, trying to see something or understand something.

  Maybe I was recalling the same tense moment, two of us in a room and the words spoken by the father.

  I’m going with her, he said.

  Now, two years later, he was finding his way toward these words.

  “That world, the one above,” she said, “is being lost to the systems. To the transparent networks that slowly occlude the flow of all those aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans from elevator buttons and doorbells.”

  I wanted to think about this. That slowly occlude the flow. But she kept on talking, looking up from the tabletop to study us in our collective aspect, the earthlings and the shaved otherworlders.

  “Those of you who will return to the surface. Haven’t you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?”

  She needed a name that started with the letter Z.

  “Here of course we refine our methods constantly. We are putting our science into the wonder of reanimation. There is no slinking trivia. No drift of applications.”

  A clipped voice, authoritative, slightly accented, and the tension in her body, the stretched energy. I could call her Zina. Or Zara. The way the capital letter Z dominates a word or name.

  The door opened and a man entered. Bruised jeans and a pullover shirt, long pigtail dangling. This was new, the plaited hair, but the man was easily recognizable as one of the Stenmark twins. Which one, and did it matter?

  The woman remained at one end of the table, the man took up a position at the other end, informally, with no hint of staged choreography. They did not acknowledge each other.

  He made a linked gesture, face and hand, indicating that we have to begin somewhere so let’s just see what happens.

  “Saint Augustine. Let me tell you what he said. Goes like this.”

  He paused and closed his eyes, giving the impression that his words belonged to darkness, coming to us out of the centuries.

  “ ‘And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.’ ”

  I thought what.

  It took him a while to open his eyes. Then he stared over Zara’s head into the far wall.

  He said, “I won’t attempt to set this remark within the meditation on Latin grammar that inspired it. I simply place it before you as a challenge. Something to think about. Something to engage you in your body pod.”

  The same deadpan Stenmark. But he had clearly aged, face drawn tighter, hands veined a deep blue. I’d given the twins a total of four first names but could not unscramble them now.

  “Terror and war, everywhere now, sweeping the surface of our planet,” he said. “And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia. The primitive weapons, the man in the rickshaw wearing a bomb vest. Not a man necessarily, could be a boy or girl or woman. Say the word. Jinriksha. Still hand-pulled in certain towns and cities. The small two-wheeled carriage. The small homemade explosive. And on the battlefield, assault rifles of earlier times, old Soviet weapons, old battered tanks. All these attacks and battles and massacres embedded in a twisted reminiscence. The skirmishes in the mud, the holy wars, the bombed-out buildings, entire cities reduced to hundreds of rubbled streets. Hand-to-hand combat that takes us back in time. No petrol, no food or water. Men in jungle packs. Crush the innocent, burn the huts and poison the wells. Relive the history of the bloodline.”

  Head slanted, hands in pockets.

  “And the post-urban terrorist, having abandoned his adopted city or country, what does he contribute? Websites that transmit atavistic horrors. Beheadings out of dreadful folklore. And the fierce interdictions, the centuries’ old doctrinal disputes, kill those who belong to the other caliphate. Everywhere, enemies who share histories and memories. It is the patchwork sweep of a world war, unnamed as such. Or am I crazy? Or am I a babbling fool? Lost wars in remote terrain. Storm the village, kill the men, rape the women, abduct the children. Hundreds dead but guess what—no film or photographs, so what’s the point, where’s the reaction. And warriorship in brighter light. We see it all the time. Scenes of burning tanks and trucks, soldiers or militiamen in dark hoods standing amid the crushed barbed wire witnessing a conflagration while they pound on a scorched bathtub with hammers and rifle butts and car jacks to send an ancestral drumbeat into the night.”

  He appeared to be in a state of near seizure, body shaking now, hands whirling.

  He said, “What is war? Why talk about war? Our concerns here are wider and deeper. We live every minute in the embrace of our shared belief, the vision of undying mind and body. But their wars have become inescapable. Isn’t war the only ripple on the dim surface of human affairs? Or am I brainsick? Isn’t there a deficiency out there, a shallow spirit that guides the collective will?”

 
; He said, “Who are they without their wars? These events have become insistent clusters that touch and spread and bring us all into range of a monodrama far larger, worldwide, than we’ve ever witnessed.”

  Zara was watching him now and I was watching her. They were clinging to the surface, weren’t they, both of them? Earth in all its meanings, third planet from the sun, realm of mortal existence, every definition in between. I didn’t want to forget that she needed a surname. I owed her this. Isn’t that why I was here, to subvert the dance of transcendence with my tricks and games?

  “People on bicycles, the only means of transport for noncombatants in the war zone except for walking, limping or crawling. Running is reserved for the warring factions and for the news photographers who cover the scene, as in earlier world wars. Is there a longing for hand-to-hand, for crush his skull and smoke a cigarette. Car bombings at sacred sites. Rocket launchings by the hundreds. Families living in stinking basements, no lights, no heat. Outside, men are tearing down the bronze statue of the former national hero. A hallowed act, rooted in remembrance, in re-experience. Men in camouflage uniforms spattered with mud. Men in bullet-scarred jeeps. The rebels, the volunteers, the insurgents, the separatists, the activists, the militants, the dissidents. And those who return home to bleak memories and deep depression. A man in a room, where death shall be deathless.”

  He was deadpan again, faceless, body rocking slightly. Where is his brother? And what is this man’s relationship with Zara, although maybe she is Nadya. He has a wife back home, I’d already established this, the brothers married to sisters. I wanted to hear the lively tilt of the twins in their merged commentary. Was the missing twin a sleek nanobody crusted in ice in a lonely pod? Were all pods the same height? And here is Nadya, who stands at the other end of the table. Are they mismatched lovers or total strangers?

  Stenmark said, “Apocalypse is inherent in the structure of time and long-range climate and cosmic upheaval. But are we seeing the signs of a self-willed inferno? And are we counting the days before advanced nations, or not so advanced, begin to deploy the most hellish weapons? Isn’t it inevitable? All the secret nestings in various parts of the world. Will planned aggressions be nullified by cyberattack? Will the bombs and missiles reach their targets? Are we safe here in our subterrane? And whatever the megatonnage, how will the shock register continent to continent, the blow to world consciousness? How post-Hiroshima and post-Nagasaki? Back to the old shattered cities, to primeval ruin one hundred thousand times more devastating than before. I think of the dead and half-dead and badly injured, nostalgically placed on rickshaws to be pulled across the crushed landscape. Or am I lost in the hazy memory of old film footage?”

  I sneaked a look at the bald woman across the table, seated next to Ross. Anticipation, a near joy visible in her face. It didn’t matter what the speaker had to say. She was eager to slip out of this life into timeless repose, leaving behind all the shaky complications of body, mind and personal circumstance.

  Stenmark appeared to be finished. Hands folded at his midsection, head lowered. In this prayer stance he said something to his colleague. He was speaking the resident language, the unique system of the Convergence, a set of voice sounds and gestures that made me think of dolphins communicating in mid-ocean. She responded with an extended remark that included some head-bobbing, possibly comic in other circumstances but not here, not with Nadya doing the bobbing.

  Her accent vanished inside the opaque bubble of whatever she was saying. She left her position and walked along one side of the table, placing her hand on the shaved head of each of the heralds in turn.

  “Time is multiple, time is simultaneous. This moment happens, has happened, will happen,” she said. “The language we’ve developed here will enable you to understand such concepts, those of you who will enter the capsules. You will be the newborns, and over time the language will be instilled.”

  She turned the corner and swung around to the other end of the table.

  “Signs, symbols, gestures and rules. The name of the language will be accessible only to those who speak it.”

  She placed her hand on my father’s head—my father or his representation, the naked icon he would soon become, a dormant in a capsule, waiting for his cyber-resurrection.

  Her accent thickened now, maybe because I wanted it to.

  “Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide. Except right here, of course, in this dynamic enclave, where we breathe safe air and live outside the range of the combative instincts, the blood desperation so recently detailed for us, on so many levels.”

  Stenmark walked to the door.

  “Ignore the manly directive,” he said to us. “It will only get you killed.”

  Then he was gone. Where to, what next. Nadya looked up and away toward a corner of the room. Her arms were raised now, framing her face, and she spoke in the language of the Convergence. She had a strength of presence. But what was she saying, and to whom? She was a singular figure, self-enclosed, high-collared shirt, fitted trousers. I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman’s skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine? The skirt whipping against the legs, a wind so brisk that the woman turns sideways, facing away from the force of it, the skirt dancing up, folding between the thighs.

  She was Nadya Hrabal. That was her name.

  - 8 -

  I was in the chair in my room, waiting for someone to come and take me somewhere else.

  I was thinking about the free play of step-by-step and word-for-word that we experience up there, out there, walking and talking under the sky, swabbing on suntan lotion and conceiving children and watching ourselves age in the bathroom mirror, next to the toilet where we evacuate and the shower where we purify.

  Now here I am, in a habitat, a controlled environment where days and nights are interchangeable, where the inhabitants speak an occult language and where I am forced to wear a wristband that contains a disk that reports my whereabouts to those who watch and listen.

  Except that I wasn’t wearing a wristband, was I? This visit was different. A deathwatch. The son permitted to accompany his father into the depths, beyond the allowable levels.

  I slept for a time in the chair and when I woke up my mother was present in the room. Madeline or her aura. How strange, I thought, that she might find me here, now in particular, in the wake of the woeful choice that Ross has made, her husband for a time. I wanted to sink into the moment. My mother. How ill-suited these two words were to this huge cratered enclosure, where people maintained a studied blankness about their nationality, their past, their families, their names. Madeline in our living room with her avatar of personal technology, the mute button on the TV remote. Here she is, a breath, an emanation.

  I used to follow her along the stately aisles of the enormous local pharmacy, a boy in his neo-pubescence, his budhood, reading the labels on boxes and tubes of medication. Sometimes I sneaked open a container to read the printed insert, eager to sample the impacted jargon of warnings, precautions, adverse reactions, contraindications.

  “Time to stop mousing around,” she said.

  I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. There were memories, everywhere, unsummoned. There were images, visions, voices and how a woman’s last breath gives expression to her son’s constrained humanity. Here was the neighbor with the cane, motionless, ever so, in the doorway, and here was my mother, an arm’s length away, a touch away, in stillness.

  Madeline using her thumbnail to gouge price stickers off the items s
he’d purchased, a determined act of vengeance against whatever was out there doing these things to us. Madeline standing in place, eyes closed, rolling her arms up and around, again and again, a form of relaxation. Madeline watching the traffic channel, forever it seemed, as the cars crossed the screen soundlessly, passing out of her view and back into the lives of the drivers and passengers.

  My mother was ordinary in her own way, free-souled, my place of safe return.

  • • •

  The escort was a nondescript man who seemed less a human being than a life-form. He led me through the halls and then pointed to the door of the food unit and went away.

  The food tasted like medicated sustenance and I was trying to think my way through it, to defeat it mentally, when the Monk walked in. I hadn’t thought of the Monk in some time but hadn’t forgotten him either. Was he here only when I was here? He wore a plain brown robe, full-length, and was barefoot. This made sense but I didn’t know why or how. He sat at the facing table, seeing only what was in his plate.

  “We’ve been here before, you and I, and here we are again,” I said.

  I looked at him openly. I mentioned his account of the journey he’d made to the holy mountain in Tibet. Then I watched him eat, his head nearly in the plate. I mentioned our visit to the hospice, he and I—the safehold. I surprised myself by recalling that word. I spoke the word twice. He ate and then I ate but I kept watching him, long hands, condensed look. He was wearing his last meal on his robe. Did it fall off his fork or did he vomit it up?

  He said, “I’ve outlasted my memory.”

  He looked older and the sense he carried with him of nowhereness was more pronounced than ever and in fact this is where we were. Nowhere. I watched him nearly consume his fork with the food that was on it.